The fact that the property market is dominated by some of the most powerful business interests in Hong Kong readily explains why the government is so attentive to their concerns and has been persuaded that preservation of high property prices is somehow sacred.

Government policy on land sales has ensured that a very small clique exercises quite disproportionate control over the market and maintains the high prices and profit margins that are the envy of the world. But it is not just the tycoons who have a stake here because many ordinary people invest the bulk of their assets in property, and they don't want these assets diminishing in value. Indeed, this is the excuse usually given by the government to ensure what it calls 'market stability'.

Yet the excuse would make sense only if the government thought it had to preserve the value of all assets such as shares, bonds and many other investment instruments. Investors, however, fully understand that they need to live with price volatility and don't expect the government to provide some kind of guarantee for what amounts to speculation.

Housing is quite another matter. The history of the government housing policy shows why this is so. The massive public housing programme was in part a genuine social welfare initiative and in equal part a mechanism to allow employers to keep wages down because a purely free market in rental housing would have intensified demands for higher pay. When better-off taxpayers started grumbling about the cost of public housing, they were sharply told by officials that the alternative was wage inflation, which would eat into corporate profitability.

If the government had intended to make public housing tenants more independent, it would not have scrapped the Home Ownership Scheme, and indeed would have followed the example of countries like Britain to embark on a programme of selling public housing units to their tenants.

However, property developers hate this kind of thing because it creates a pool of much cheaper housing and has the effect of generally depressing prices. They would hate it even more if the government made a serious attempt to break up the property cartel by selling much smaller plots of land, thus allowing greater competition among developers.

Instead, the government occupies itself fidgeting at the edges by placing limitations on home loans given by banks, playing around with interest rates (a limited exercise because of the fixed link to the US dollar) and thinking it very clever to have officials make endless statements about property prices.

There is no need for this, and there is no need for what amounts to a housing policy for the better-off. But there is a need for a proper housing policy for the poor. Instead of building minimalist public housing estates, the government should be building better ones. It should find ways to reduce public housing by selling off flats to tenants at reasonable prices.

Were this to be done, there would be the usual squeals of anguish from the self-appointed guardians of the free market, but they can be ignored as they don't complain over other forms of government intervention that maintain the uneven playing field in Hong Kong.

Hong Kong is a rich society with one of the most unequal distributions of income anywhere in the world. Titling the balance back in favour of the poor is seen as nothing short of revolutionary, but something could be done in this direction by having a real housing policy, not simply a policy for keeping property prices high.

Stephen Vines is a Hong Kong-based journalist and entrepreneur